Cyril Rum was an angel on sabbatical to earth. He lived in a non-descript house in an even more non-descript town. It was ideal for Cyril as he had been an angel a long time and as everyone knew eternity was “a heck of a long time” and Cyril was due some respite from it all.

On earth, he had settled in nicely and was intrigued from the very start with the intricacies of human life. They seemed to get caught up emotion a lot he observed. For Cyril this was something very new for in eternity emotion was never a cause for anyone to get the least concerned with let alone caught up on.

After all, eternity was by its very nature, eternity. You were there, so you’d best accept your lot and get on with it. Most did and eternity was happy when most of its occupants found solace in its very nature.

But on earth, that didn’t exist. Cyril was slow to explore his environment cautious as to what he might discover or give away. But the street he lived on was a quiet street, and his house was the last on it before the road stretched away into the scrub and sandhills.

He found a mentor, though she didn’t know it, in his neighbour Mildred Thrup, a sixty-year-old single woman, bereft of family and it appeared to Cyril, friends.

They became firm friends and shared the occasional cup of tea on Cyril’s back veranda where he had two white chairs facing each other. Mildred was a font of information to Cyril.

She knew a lot about the people in the street and was known to ask Cyril about himself which Cyril initially skirted around but over time did reveal to Mildred his true angelic qualities.

He did so but he swore Mildred to secrecy, and she was happy to be the only person who knew his true identity.

Cyril often asked Mildred to explain why people found it difficult to do one thing. To Cyril, everything that happened seemed to be subject to a whole bunch of conditions or circumstances that were accepted as stumbling blocks.

Happiness Cyril said was a state that in eternity you could achieve if you were in the right place. On earth, he observed people searched everywhere and every how to find it and when they thought they had it they let it slip through their fingers.

Mildred explained to Cyril that humans were subject to greed. Over her years of observing the people around her she’d come to the conclusion that basically people were greedy and as long as that existed, they would never be happy.

Cyril didn’t understand greed either until Mildred showed him the Lantrys.

They had two of everything, each object better than the first one. Be it cars, houses, kettles or toasters the Lantrys were forever seeking to be bigger and better than everybody else.

“It’s about social standing,” explained Mildred. “You want people to think you are better than everyone else.”

Cyril listened to all this and thought for a moment that the intricacies of the human being he would never understand. Thank goodness, he thought all this greed comes to nought in the next world.

Later that night as he sat at his kitchen table sipping a cup of his favourite herbal tea, he thought to himself that if he managed to stay on earth a little longer, he might come to understand what it was they were all on about.

8 Responses to Weekend Writing Prompt #15 – Intricate – Cyril Rum

A delightful reflection on materiality and the consequences of over-consumption. I hope Cyril will quickly come to understand why our reptilian instinct for survival has evolved to become greed and share his thoughts with the whole world.

To my thinking, over consumption leads to consumption of spirit. Consumerism will consume you! 🙂

Social standing? I find this widely used term a little distasteful. I think of it as meaning stratification of society. I’ve often wondered where points of division actually occur in society and what or who determines them? Could it be the self-indulgent egocentric 3% of the world’s population who own 99% of the world’s wealth dictating terms? After-all, other than gravity, the air we breathe, and our imagination, all else costs money.

Thanks Dewin, great comment as always. I think whether we like it or not ‘social standing’ is a cruel fact of life. People will always want more, outdo other, feel superior, its what happens when you think you ‘deserve’ to be better than others.

Ahh those little old devils called greed and self-gratification. How best does humankind seek to remove the greedy gene? Education?

I applaud reward for honest endeavour proportionate to the worth of the honesty and the endeavour. I consider there to be a difference between worth and value. Value is an arbitrary quality given to external objects, worth is a visceral emotion, a denomination also with a sliding scale but one with benevolence and intelligence attached..

Regards social standing, I do agree with you Michael and certainly believe modern societies should not be differentiated by a perception of class. I tend to think that class emerges from the same rotting seed as also spawns the propensity for greed. A friend of mine works for a government agency administering Social Security. I was told they have the Queen as their symbolic figure-head. They also told me that there are currently 3.7 million children living in poverty in the UK. Quoting from Barnardo’s they added, ‘that’s over a quarter of all children in the UK. 1.7 million of these children are living in severe poverty. In the UK 63% of children living in poverty are in a family where someone works.’ (https://www.barnardos.org.uk/what_we_do/our_work/child_poverty/child_poverty_what_is_poverty/child_poverty_statistics_facts.html)

I asked what the Queen was meant to symbolise when such figures made obvious the neglect of her subjects on her land under her reign. They were unable to provide an answer.

Wonderful story. You raise some really interesting, thought-provoking points, Michael. It’s sad that the need to be better than others can weigh so heavily on some people and occupy so much of their thoughts. Thanks for joining in with the Weekend Writing Prompt. Have a great weekend 🙂